


Meditations on Magic and the Divine

by Alona



Category: The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:10:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7214518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a description of a course of research pursued by Thom of Trebond, age thirteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meditations on Magic and the Divine

_Precepts for the Gifted_ was a lengthy treatise on magical theory written by the Gallan Gisilbert Reeve. It had formed a touchstone of standard magical curriculum for close to two centuries. More copies of it existed than any other known work on sorcery, in part owing to Reeve's invention and implementation of an elegant spell that allowed a single scribe simultaneously to produce multiple copies. One of Reeve's own copies, too precious an artifact to be expunged along with lesser magical works, had been in their father's library at Trebond. Thom had all but memorized the hefty tome before he ever came to the City of the Gods. 

He'd been naïve enough when he first arrived to think the masters had something to teach him. Lessons with them quickly remedied this mistake. When they taught the _Precepts_ , picking sections from it at random so as to strip away half their meaning by the loss of context, they presented conclusions that had been obvious to Thom when he was eight as astounding revelations. Well, of course the story of the rooster and the nanny goat was literal and not intended as a parable, he wanted to tell them; what would be the point of presenting it before the instructions for reading signs in bodies of water, otherwise? 

He kept quiet, though, listening as the other students let themselves be guided through the steps of Reeve's arguments, as delighted as if they had worked it all out for themselves. There would be plenty of time later to show off. Still, it was difficult not to compose lengthy arguments refuting the masters' limited teachings, and when the arguments had fully matured – through repeated daydreams in which he presented them to a shadowy listener worthy of appreciating their clarity of reasoning – Thom wrote them down. He kept notes on all his personal studies in a succession of workbooks. The earliest of these were bespelled simply to look blank to others; later, he had learned to make them appear to be dull texts. 

It was no use debating anyone around him. Thom's focus had to be on learning for himself. The surest way to learn anything was to go through the cloister's libraries; the surest way to be left alone to do that was not to attract too much attention. 

When he was thirteen he came upon a book called _The Tread of the Wave Walker_ , which was primarily a collection of personal recollections of the sea goddess, interspersed with interpretations from the sorcerer who had assembled them. However, the interpretations veered at one point into a meditation on the nature of prophecy. That section referenced another work by Gisilbert Reeve:

> "The universe existing in a state of indeterminacy, it is not given even to the gods to see far into the future. Prophecies, which by the definition I have expounded above must reflect divine inspiration, are thus rather in the nature of a promise to shape reality than a foretelling of what must be. That the gods must give voice to these promises through their mortal vessels is both a profound mystery, in the religious (or occult) sense, and a fundamental law of reality. Through laborious exegesis this is teased out in Gisilbert Reeve's _Meditations on Magic and the Divine,_ though Reeve himself has difficulty admitting the necessary conclusion when faced with it."

Thom copied down the quote, along with its citation, on a fresh page of his book. In the margin beside the first line he faintly scratched "seers?", then spent the rest of the day ignoring any comments addressed to him as he considered the issue more fully.

Seeing was one of the least common expressions of the Gift, and it came in many forms. Only a small number of seers had a limited power of precognition, but those few generally exercised it without further intervention from the gods. If it was true that the gods could see no more than these Gifted humans, he reasoned, then the divide between gods and mortals was not so great as it seemed. Something to think about – when he had found further evidence to support it. 

(Two days later, while forcing down the tasteless slop that passed for breakfast at the cloister, it occurred to him that true indeterminacy would not allow for even so much foreknowledge, for anyone – would it? Was there limited determinacy, then? Was that even possible? What did it mean for human choices? He would have to look to see if anyone had written on the subject before.)

This other work of Reeve's might contain some of that evidence. The mention of it had piqued his interest, anyway: that it should not be as well-known as the _Precepts_ was unremarkable, but for it to be wholly obscure was peculiar. He searched the libraries but failed to turn it up. 

Carefully, masking his interest, he tried mentioning it to others. Some recalled vague references to it but could tell him nothing of its contents. No one had ever heard of an extant copy. One of the older adepts had once met a visiting mage who'd read a lengthy critique of it: "The purest drivel, I was assured," said Adept Wishart. "Having it known would discredit Reeve's masterpiece in the public eye. Why do you ask?" Thom said it was only passing curiosity. He didn't think much of the visiting mage's opinion, nor of Wishart's understanding of the common attitude towards magic. 

The likeliest person to know would have been the Mithrans' librarian, but that would have given the game away. Instead Thom paid particular attention to books touching on similar themes, collecting a handful of other – maddeningly uninformative – references to the missing work. Their timing suggested that it had been written at least a decade later than the _Precepts_ , which put it squarely in the period of Reeve's life for which no biographical data existed – and Reeve was an indistinct figure at the best of times, his personality apparent only in his work. There were also no references earlier than sixty years back. Had something put the work out of favor?

Thom was well aware that it could have been something as mundane as another, superior work appearing on the same topic – except, as far as he could judge, there was no such work. Divinity was a rarely explored topic in magical literature, for all that most Tortallan sorcerers were trained by religious orders. 

(The indeterminacy problem continued to worry him in spare moments. The knowledge that the universe was indeterminate came from the gods. If it were not the case that the universe was absolutely indeterminate, were the gods lying? Could they lie? Or was it somehow necessary for the gods themselves to be deceived?) 

His next step was to search through the records of the other orders represented at the City of the Gods. He obtained permission to leave the cloister and poke around their relics and libraries by proposing some independent research for a comparative study of different disciplines of plant magic: a safe enough topic, and broad. 

With some orders this was all it took. The Dream King's devotees and the followers of the Trickster were odd, but they did not mind sharing their resources. The acolyte who showed him around the Oratory of the Black God was even terribly friendly, joking that it took quite a mind to seek texts about plant magic among priests of the dead. Unnerved, Thom nearly told the boy what he was really after. He concluded his search in a hurry and left.

The priests at other temples insisted on looking for the works themselves, leaving Thom alone in their anterooms hastily throwing out vision spells to riffle the stacks and shelves. Being repeatedly pressed for time, he discovered a shortcut through the spell-weave. It consoled him for having to rush, which he hated. 

At the Convent of the Mother of Mountains even this trick failed him. The blessed library was shielded, with what felt like the force of every Gifted priestess in the place behind the shield. Thom thought that if he pushed he might break through, but it would certainly be noticed. He reluctantly accepted that if there was a copy of _Meditations on Magic and the Divine_ in there, he was not about to get his hands on it. He was also just as happy to leave the convent. He hadn't enjoyed his time there. 

To be thorough, he checked through most of the houses of worship devoted to lesser gods. There were scores of them, from solid buildings that would have done as temples in good-sized towns down to single rooms above shops and inns. Making time around his lessons, it took Thom a full month to visit all but the least likely. Some of them were carved into the foothills of the surrounding mountains, and he had to borrow one of the cloister's donkeys to reach them. He was heartily cursing himself for his persistence by then and thinking wistfully of divination spells that would point him in the right direction. Caution prevailed, though. Divination was a risk that would have to wait another year or two. 

In a cell that was barely more than a lean-to, a tiny, white-haired hermit devoted to the Smiling Goddess Without A Name – a goddess of political autonomy belonging to a people far to the east – who was evidently desperate for a listener laid out her order's teachings over a cup of surprisingly pleasant beer she had brewed herself. "It is not an abstract freedom of choice that worries us," she said. "Our path is to question where the freedom of one person meets the freedom of the next, and on and on, until we are asking about the individual and all her neighbors, all her countrymen, all the world, even unto the gods."

It was an unsettling conversation, and Thom was relieved to get away from it. In all, though his true purpose went unanswered, he collected a great deal of material for his cover project.

(Was there a way for a sorcerer to prove determinacy or indeterminacy independent of the gods?)

One of the masters had been assigned to oversee his project, and it was here that one of life's scalp-tingling coincidences came Thom's way. 

Master Orvar, an overpoweringly energetic person, had corresponded for many years with a mage at the Carthaki university. The substance of this correspondence made up most of his conversation. Thom did not mind hearing details of Carthaki court gossip, even if much of it was years out of date. His attention was repaid in full, anyway, when Orvar mentioned that his friend had been given the task of curating a collection of books and priceless artifacts that a noble had left to the university in his will. Orvar's friend had been surprised to find an unknown work by Gisilbert Reeve among the collection, and had resolved to make copies at once. As soon as they were finished, he would be sure to send one in the care of a trusted messenger to enrich the Mithrans' library. 

Only Orvar's distracted excitement prevented Thom from betraying himself at that news. To be sure, there could be other lost works by Reeve; it did not have to be the _Meditations_. Nonetheless, Thom impatiently awaited the book's arrival and prepared schemes that would allow him to study it without seeming too eager. 

In the meantime he had his comparative study to write up, and in spite of himself he became engrossed in it. He had chosen plant magic as a subject that the masters would find innocent, meaning to produce the sort of plodding work the student he pretended to be would turn out. He had never paid much attention to plant magic before. Spending as much time as he did on it, he became fascinated by the different approaches to the principle of life. The stories, too, would have done credit to a minstrel. 

In one account, which Thom could not resist using in his introduction, a mage-general defeated a realm's invaders by developing a fast-growing type of moss that released poisonous gases; he miscalculated, though, and poisoned the land and its skies. After he was executed for his mistake, other mages created plants that would release light and air when grown in caves deep underground. The bulk of the nation's population survived like that for eight years, until all the poison aboveground had gone. 

Thom's work sprouted subheadings daily, and that only included the facts. His conclusions he kept to himself, beyond what was necessarily reflected in the way he organized the information. At times it felt a little bleak, writing about growing things in the City of the Gods, where nothing seemed to grow but what was ugly and unpalatable. He told himself firmly that he did not care. 

 

By the time he had a draft ready to discuss with Master Orvar, they expected the lost work to arrive any day. 

Thom found Orvar in a state of distraction. "Arrested!" he cried, seeing Thom. "Bright Mithros guide us! They came to arrest Rostam at his chambers. He barely escaped. He is on his way to seek refuge in Maren."

Thom stared at him. Rostam was Orvar's Carthaki friend. "What have the Carthaki authorities got against him?"

"Reeve's book. An imperial official heard of it and declared it dangerous – treason to possess it, to attempt to copy it, to distribute it. Carthak may warn the king to expect the book. Rostam says it must be destroyed when it arrives, for our safety. He took a chance, using his scrying crystal to warn me from the road." 

"Nonsense," said Thom at once. "Perhaps that is the way things are in Carthak, but here the Crown can't interfere with the temples – can it?"

Orvar's expression flickered oddly as he focused on Thom. "It depends. Texts have been banned before for containing treasonous or heretical notions. Our position is not strong there. Balance must be kept between the temples and the Crown, but harboring a text that may incite rebellion –"

"Creates an imbalance. Yes, I see now." There was nothing else for it: he would have to intercept the messenger bringing the book and keep it for himself. It was even more attractive now he had reason to believe there was something forbidden in it. 

"It is all far above your head, anyhow," said Orvar, visibly calling himself to task. "Shall we have a look at your draft?"

They sat over it for an hour, to little effect. Orvar was beside himself with anxiety, though it was difficult to tell whether it was for his friend or for the threat posed by the book. Plant magic was the furthest thing from his mind. 

Thom seethed. He knew just the working he would need to get to the messenger first. It was challenging enough that he had held off attempting it, but this was the perfect opportunity. He was wasting time listening to Orvar's rambling. 

"Are you going to destroy the book?" he asked before he left. 

"Why, of course," said Orvar. "Off with you."

Was it Thom's imagination, or had the reply really sounded a little too bland? Likely Orvar had some plan of his own for preserving the work – which did nothing to alter Thom's plans. 

Returning to his cell, he found the working in his notes. He read both the description and his own ideas about it through twice, fixing everything in his mind. The scroll he'd copied it from had included a block of warnings longer than the spell itself, which he had dutifully copied as well. He didn't like the superior, coddling tones of the warnings, but he refused to be one of those foolish sorcerers held up as cautionary tales for children. 

Bringing up his door ward to warn him of coming interruptions, he took a seat on his cot with his back against the wall, shifting until he found a comfortable position. In his lap he placed a rough sketch of the cloister's perimeter with its three gates accurately marked. It took another long adjustment to master his giddiness at the prospect of accomplishing so demanding a working. 

The spell would keep track of comings and goings by the gates: he would hear what was said and get an impression of travelers' points of departure or destinations. That was the idea, at least. He would waylay Rostam's messenger and take the book from him. Thom was still working on a suitable lie. 

First he focused on setting up blocks so that his working could not be probed by others. This he was accustomed to doing, but he wanted to be especially sure now. It took him a couple of hours. After that he made the sketch represent the physical reality of the cloister in his mind. It kept slipping away from him. After numerous failed attempts, he noticed a flaw in his spell-weave. It was several layers down, and it had to be fixed before he could go any further. Exasperated, he almost lost his hold on the spell altogether. 

But this was hardly the first, second, or even tenth time he had let an error go by unnoticed. He had become adept at picking his way down at the point where the problem was without having to work all the way backwards through the layers. It took concentration above and beyond the spell itself, as well as an intricate practical understanding of its structure, which could only be gained by making this kind of mistake and working out how to fix it. 

Magical texts were full of proper, formal methods for visualizing complex spell-weaves. Most of them were nothing like what Thom had come up with on his own, but he had doggedly tried every one, just in case. They all worked, more or less, but they felt clumsy and unintuitive. Once he had come across a description that was a perfect match for his own method. He had read it with the oddest feeling: a dead mind had experienced the world just as he did. He wasn't sure he liked knowing that. Better to be unique. 

Fixing his mistake was a painful, fidgety process. The muscles in his hands and arms cramped and twitched with tension. A few times he had to pause and hold everything still for several aching minutes before going on. At last it was done. He completed the remaining layers, and the model slid into place. 

The last part of the working was the longest and most difficult: this was where he would send out and anchor his magical senses. He was relieved to find midway through that the same shortcut he had applied to the vision spell worked here, and almost lost focus again trying to find the resemblance between the two spells. No: he steered his mind back where it belonged. Having all the parts of the spell assembled, he set it in motion. 

Thom opened his eyes. Even with the shortcut, the working had taken so long that dawn was breaking. Its faint light was too bright, the noises of the waking city too loud. A lone bird chirped somewhere outside; it may as well have been sitting on his shoulder. 

He squeezed his eyes shut again. The spell was working. Had to be working. The din of impressions battering him could be nothing else. Overwhelmed, his senses couldn't interpret the information they were receiving. His head spun. Slowly, swallowing often to fight down nausea, he worked on sorting the impressions out and lowering them to an acceptable murmur. When he no longer felt sick, he tried opening his eyes again. The sun was already above the horizon. After an initial jolt, he could look at the patch of light it made on the wall without discomfort. 

Stiff and still a little dizzy, Thom went to clean up before his lessons. The nice thing about pretending he never paid attention was that no one would notice the difference if he dozed off. 

He almost missed the messenger when she arrived the following morning; he had not been expecting a woman. Well, why should I have been? he thought crossly as he hurried to the day gate. He could imagine Alanna mocking him all too clearly. 

The messenger, mounted on a tired-looking horse, was still exchanging pleasantries with the door-warden when Thom reached the courtyard by the gate. She wore a head-scarf and veil, and a chain-mail shirt over a voluminous dress. He knew that she had traveled by ship from Carthak to Port Caynn and ridden north. She had been delayed two days waiting for the passes to clear after a late snowfall. He could not tell if she had gone alone, but she looked as though she had been prepared for it.

"Thank you, no need to send a message," Thom said to the door-warden. He turned to the messenger, approaching her horse cautiously. "You have a package for Master Orvar, my lady?" 

She looked down at him. She appeared to be middle-aged, judging by the portion of her olive brown face visible above her veil. "Greetings," she said. "Did you shrink in a dreadful accident, or have you discovered the secret of eternal youth?"

"I am a student of Master Orvar's," said Thom, calling up his prepared lie. "For reasons it is safer for you not to know, he must not receive the package from you or have any direct knowledge of your presence."

She dismounted. "The censors have heard of it, then? My brother was afraid of that."

Then he should have warned us right off, thought Thom, but he said nothing.

"We discovered it was on the lists, but he wouldn't stop," she went on, her voice distracted.

Thom said, "Master Rostam is on his way to Maren now."

"He got away safe, then?" She murmured what must have been a prayer under her breath. Then she took a cloth-wrapped parcel from her saddlebag and held it out to Thom. "What will your master do with it?"

Thom all but grabbed it out of her hands. Holding her gaze carefully, he said, "He plans to destroy it, naturally."

She blinked once, twice, then nodded. "A wise plan." 

They understood each other, to a point, then. Thom was desperate to ask her what about the work was so offensive, but he needed to make sure she left at once, without any chance that Orvar would see her. 

When she had gone, he returned to his cell. He had missed dawn services and would certainly be assigned penance for that, but at least the timing meant no one had been around to see him speak to the messenger. The door-warden he'd paid off. 

The first thing he did, still clutching the parcel, was to let go of his working. It felt like stepping under cover out of a torrential rainstorm; his mind was quiet again. He had been excited to do a working so large, but the constant awareness of it had been difficult to carry around. There had to be a better way to do it, one that didn't tax the rest of his forces so much. Well, he would have time to think of one before he tried it again.

After a moment's hesitation, he untied the parcel and unwrapped the cloth. Inside was a single book, quite slim and freshly bound, with gilded pages. Stamped in gold on its spine were the words "Reeve – Meditations" in block capitals. Thom had opened it and flipped with immense deliberation to the first paragraphs before he remembered to take a breath. He read:

> Magic has been gifted us by the gods. So it has always been known. Yet for that, mistrust and fear of the Gifted have always thrived, the most pious being one with the most fearful. How to explain this circumstance? How understand the purposes of the gods and reconcile with the outcomes of their movements?

The next several pages described incidents of Gifted people who had been shunned by their communities or unable to train their Gifts. Thom put the book down, frowning. He had reason to know that there were those who disliked and feared magic. They were jealous of a power they did not posses, that was all. There was no point in arguing with them, he had always thought. You simply became powerful enough that there was no way for anyone to touch you.

It was not a promising start. 

Still, he recalled that there were parts of the _Precepts_ that had made no sense to him the first time he'd read them; they had even seemed foolish or extraneous. When he had better understood the structure of the work and the meanings Reeve had hidden in the juxtaposition of ideas, the confusing sections had taken on their true significance. Those flashes of understanding had been every bit as thrilling as completing a difficult spell. _Meditations on Magic and the Divine_ was a different, and later, work. There was no reason to be disappointed that it did not strike him as either brilliant or treasonous at once. 

Time and study would make everything clearer – but not now. Reluctantly, he hid the book. The rest of the day was spent following his usual schedule and fulfilling the penance assigned to him for missing services. He was asleep on his feet through most of it, and by the time he returned to his cell he couldn't have read a word, not if it had been a revelation penned by Mithros himself in letters ten feet high.

> To live close to the gods is a burden. It is a burden shared by all mortal men, and it is often borne most heavily by those who sense only the dim shadow, rather than the blinding light, of the gods' presence in all our lives. This is not because the gods are cruel. The gods are loving, but they seek order also. They seek it in progress. Heroes chosen by the gods lead solitary lives filled with hardship, and bring devastation and upheaval wherever they go. The gods' choice is stamped for all to see upon the life of a hero. The Gift, too, is a stamp of the gods' choice: it is a signal that a mortal has been touched by divine will and set apart by it from his fellow creature. In the face of nearness to divinity expressed in this way, the unGifted one is beset with dread. Ah, but should they not find comfort in believing that the gods have arranged matters so that no Gift shall be a burden onto its possessor or his fellows? Why, we all know the answer to that: it is simply not so. Two simple points will serve to illustrate why this is and must be.

So began the first full chapter of the _Meditations_. Thom was reading it for the second time. The first time he had taken note of Reeve's two points, which were so simple that they took fully a quarter of the book's length to explain; this time he meant to go through them slowly and condense them. There was, after all, something to what Adept Wishart's unknown commentator had said: Reeve was far more diffuse in the _Meditations_ than he had ever been in the _Precepts._

It had not struck him before, but this time Thom was unnerved by the mention of chosen heroes. Just as he had no doubt that he would be a great sorcerer one day, he was convinced that Alanna would be a hero of legend. He did not like the idea of her living a solitary life of hardship, nor was she the sort of person to enjoy leaving devastation in her wake – not much devastation, anyway. 

Uneasily, he left his work and went to look out into the corridor. Movement drew his eye to the far end. A figure ducked out of the way, then slowly reemerged: a shabby-looking man who clearly did not belong at the cloister. There was something familiar about him. 

"Ah, just who I was wanting," called the man in a hushed voice. "Letter from the capital for your lordship."

Yes, that was it: this was Cooper's man. He had brought letters from Alanna twice before. Thom went to meet him, keeping watch for observers. As before the man had chosen the best time to go unnoticed. 

"I'll be staying close for the next week," said the man, "if there's to be a reply."

Thom said that there would be and dismissed him. 

Alanna's letter was full of her excitement about her upcoming trip to the desert, and her frightened joy and puzzlement at being singled out among the pages to go.

> We will be leaving the court in a flutter, _Alanna wrote._ Some Carthaki scholar has been making copies of a prohibited book and smuggling them into Tortall. The Council of Nobles is calling for his blood and predicting all sorts of disaster. We do not know what it is all about, or at least I don't. No one is allowed to talk about what is in the book, so it is like they are all worked up about nothing. I will be glad to be away from it. I'm not sure I like the thought that there are some ideas it is dangerous just to mention.

Thom smiled. No surprises there: Alanna, who liked everything out in the open where she could fight it, would never take to such a notion. Her description of the affair did not give him any new information, but it was a measure of how seriously at least some people were taking it. He wondered whether he ought to tell her his part in the drama when he replied.

With Alanna's letter read and suitably concealed, he returned to the _Meditations_. Over the next few days he went through Reeve's "two simple points" until he knew them backwards and forwards. 

The first point stated the gods could never guarantee the life a Gifted human would lead. This was based on that same sticky truism Thom had wrestled with unsuccessfully months before: that the nature of the world was indeterminate. Reeve, otherwise expansive, took this as an unexplored assumption. Thom was disappointed, but not surprised. What followed from indeterminacy was that the use the Gifted human made or did not make of his Gift would be determined by events in his life. If his family died when he was a child, if he was enslaved, if he was crossed in love – all these things, said Reeve, could dramatically alter his actions. 

Point one digressed from there, though, to point out that while many things were uncertain, there were probabilities even the gods, above the daily run of mortal concerns, must see: a child born a commoner would be less likely to develop his Gift than a child born a noble; a girl could often hope for little better than to be village midwife, while a man, even common-born, might seek his fortune more easily with his Gift. 

These were things Thom knew but rarely had cause to think about. They simply did not interest him. However, he could not help noticing what went on around him. His fellow adepts, his masters, came by and large of noble stock or from the cream of merchant houses of other realms. If any one of them had been born a lowly commoner, he did not admit it. And, further, Thom had heard during his time at the convent how the Daughters spoke to Gifted noble girls. They could become priestesses if they chose, enforcing the Great Mother Goddess's law, powerful in their way but cut off from all the usual feminine pursuits. It must have been obvious to anyone who heard them that the Daughters were deliberately discouraging the girls from this path – or were they worried that a girl who emphatically did not want a noble lady's life would turn thoughtlessly to religion as an escape? 

This section undercut the main thrust of the point, and Thom continued to be troubled by it, the more so because he did not want to be troubled by it. What did he care about Gifted commoners who could make nothing of their Gifts? No doubt they were all like Maude, their Gifts as limited as their ideas.

But that did not satisfy him, either, for he knew it was not so. Tales of powerful common sorcerers were rare – even more rare were those where the sorcerer did not come to a bad end – but they did exist. Did that mean the gods simply gave more of the Gift to nobles? So what if they did? What was wrong with that?

Nothing in particular, that Thom could think of, but the fact that he had been led to ask the question might well have been enough for someone to declare the work heretical. Reeve did not go so far as to say it, but it was clear that he thought there _was_ something wrong with commoners and women having unequal chances to develop their Gifts; and if that could be wrong, then the whole structure of society, which denied them those chances, much be wrong as well.

Thom wondered why Reeve had written such a thing, and also what quirk of events and prevailing opinions had brought it so far out of favor that it could still have the court – as Alanna had it – in a flutter. For while the argument was there, it was by no means obvious. The way Reeve had constructed it, only someone who was looking for it would find it. Thom was embarrassed for the great theoretician. 

The second point struck him as the first taken from the other side, which was perhaps Reeve's idea of simplicity. The gods, Reeve argued, did not share a view of order with mortals. Their goal was progress, measured progress but progress all the same. Progress – that was, change – could not occur without far-reaching consequences. Different gods achieved progress in different ways, but none were without that element of catastrophe. "For is not bright Mithros, god of law, also god of war?" asked Reeve. "His influence upon mortal events tends towards stability, but only in the wake of great change." The conclusion Reeve drew from this was that the gods were inclined to dole out the Gift to suit their purposes:

> A mortal who will likely lead a nation, an army, or a movement will bring more change with the Gift than an ordinary mortal, living and toiling in obscurity. If the gods require a turn in the order of the world, they do not hesitate to grant this mortal the tool he may need. Yet if this were only one element there would be less harm, less fear. Leaders do damage and draw danger to themselves, but still they are often forces for good, heroes to those around them. 
> 
> For those movements that shake the foundations of the earth, the gods choose another set of mortals with their most awesome and terrible Gift: those who will not, in the end, master it; those who will fail, and allow it to consume them. These cursed souls bring the greatest grief and the greatest change. They destroy nations and act as foes to the gods' chosen heroes. They are, it would seem, forsaken: yet still they carry the Gift, a sign that the gods have not turned away from them.
> 
> We might question the gods in this. But because humans have been given the freedom to choose their paths, there is never certainty. Even the most lost, the most doomed, may yet choose another way.

This whole train of thought made Thom so uncomfortable that working it over was like trying to stare directly into the sun. He could only do it in brief snatches. It all sounded so much like the warnings Maude bleated out every time she came to check on him. Yet he kept worrying at it, as though he expected something more to be hidden beneath the words.

Much of the rest of the discussion went to justifying the apparent discord between the gods' limited ability to glimpse the future and this strategic distribution of the Gift. It presented a convoluted idea of time and the manner in which divine beings travelled through it. Thom found the argument at times convincing, at times infuriating in its avoidance of the underlying conflict. 

By this point, at least, he had determined that the _Meditations_ were worth all the effort he had put into getting his hands on them. They would be little help for the practical aspects of magic, but he could feel his thoughts becoming sharper as he working out Reeve's dilemmas. Besides this initial argument, the book also contained the exegesis referred to in _The Tread of the Wave Walker_ , which wrestled with a prophetic scroll in the aftermath of the prophecy's fulfillment; a rather handwringing sermon about the responsibilities of the Gifted to the unGifted; and an attempt to classify the different expressions of the Gift, curiously shifting and imprecise when compared to the _Precepts_.

When he had a good enough handle on the text, Thom planned to go back through _Precepts for the Gifted_ to see if it showed any evidence that Reeve had already been prey to preoccupations expressed in the _Meditations_. The trouble was that while he found particular passages clever, informative, or even moving, the purpose of the work as a whole escaped him. Reeve obviously meant something by it, above and beyond what he committed to the page, but he could never say it plainly.

Distracted as he was with the text, Thom remembered to write a letter back to Alanna and hand it off to Cooper's courier just as his week ran out. It was hardly his best effort in correspondence. Forgetting himself, he even went into his troubles with the _Meditations_ , which could hardly interest her. 

 

By the time Alanna's next letter arrived, he had been awaiting it impatiently. News had already reached the City of the Gods of her and Prince Jonathan's exploits in the Black City. Thom dared not hope for a detailed account of it in Alanna's own words, but there was no way she could avoid mentioning it altogether. As it turned out, the bulk of her letter was devoted to the event. Thom read avidly. 

Exciting as the description of the adventure was, it shied away from any of the details he would have found truly useful; and he was more concerned with Alanna's certainty that Duke Roger had been behind it all. There was danger to come from that quarter, danger he would only truly be able to help with once he had his mastery. He figured it would need another two years – if they would let him test for it that soon. They'd have to, that was all. 

Alanna, after all her other news, threw in a few lines referencing his last letter: "Well, of course you would be reading the forbidden, heretical book! I hope you are being careful. And last I checked, Reeve was a commoner surname even in Galla. Perhaps that is why your master sorcerer is so worked up about commoners being denied opportunity." 

The same idea had occurred to Thom, eventually, but by that time he had reached an understanding with the book. Taken altogether it was the account of a man trying to come to terms with the Gift, what it meant and what duties it imposed on the Gifted one. If there was a conclusion, some final reconciliation, Thom had not yet found it. Something, he had decided, must have had happened between the _Precepts_ and the _Meditations_ , some tragedy or revelation that had shaken Reeve and forced him to write everything down. 

It was a frightening book. Thom had never thought much about Reeve the man before – most people were not worth thinking about deeply – but naturally he had always taken it for granted that only a very powerful sorcerer could have produced the _Precepts._ If that power had not been enough to give Reeve certainty, if in fact its complexities obsessed him as he grew older...

There was nothing Thom could do with that thought. It would not sit comfortably, and he could not accept it. 

At least, having read the thing, he had a long list of questions ready should he ever encounter a god; though on the face of it Alanna's chances looked much better than his. 

He hid _Meditations on Magic and the Divine_ at the back of a bookcase in the lesser of the cloister's libraries, under an elaborate seal. Someday, perhaps, someone would find it; but it would be long after Thom had moved on to better things.


End file.
